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GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE FORUM
Features

March 2014
Volume 12, Issue 2

Cover / Q&A

4

Polar Intelligence

The Arctic region, with its
diminishing icepack and
resulting increase in maritime
and other human activity, is
becoming a more important part
of the strategic picture of the
United States and other nations,
and geospatial technology is
playing a vital role in improving
knowledge of its forbidding seaand landscapes.
By Henry Canaday

19

25

Heterogeneous
technology enables
computational capacity
to keep up with the rate
at which geospatial and
other data is growing.
By Chris J. Michael, Elias Z.
Ioup and John T. Sample

An estimated six industry
teams are competing for a
contract to provide the Air
Force and key members of
the intelligence community
with nearly $1 billion in
advanced GEOINT and
measurement and signature
intelligence (MASINT)
technology and services.
By Harrison Donnelly

High Performance
Computing

Advanced Exploitation
Competition

16
Rear Admiral Paul Becker

6

NGA Sets Its
Compass North
(and South)

The National
GeospatialIntelligence Agency
has an extensive array
of programs devoted
to meeting military,
navigation and
scientific needs in the
Arctic and Antarctic
regions.

10

12

22

As geospatial
intelligence, like
so much else in
the modern world,
increasingly integrates
mobile technology
into all aspects of
operations, one of
the key challenges
facing developers
is to ensure that the
ubiquitous devices
can efficiently share
the data they collect
and receive.
By Peter Buxbaum

A new mobile
application developed
by Riverside Research
is providing critical
situational awareness
to operators in the
field by letting them
know when their
area can be seen—
and perhaps as
importantly, not be
seen—by overhead
imaging satellites.
By Harrison Donnelly

In a recent address
to the Esri Federal
GIS User Conference,
Letitia A. Long,
director of the
National GeospatialIntelligence Agency,
hailed the contribution
of four NGA critical
strategic GEOINT
integration initiatives
in the response to
the recent Philippine
typhoon.

Sharing While
Mobile

Departments

Mobile App
Tracks Overhead
Eyes

Richard Cooke

Vice President
Geospatial Intelligence
Solutions
Exelis

28

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“Integration
doesn’t come
naturally; it
takes time and
effort to get
results from
disparate parts;
experience
doing that in
the complex
environment
of Afghanistan
paid dividends
for doing the
same in the
complex world
of Washington,
D.C., as well.”
–Rear Admiral
Paul Becker

The traditional gift for a 10th anniversary is made from tin, which is
an element that doesn’t carry much panache these days. So I hope the good
folks at the Army Geospatial Center (AGC) and U.S. Geospatial Intelligence
Foundation (USGIF) won’t take it the wrong way when I offer tin-plated
congratulations on two initiatives, each of which has had a significant
impact on the field of geospatial intelligence over the past decade.
The AGC’s 10-year-old is the BuckEye program, which has provided
unclassified, shareable, high resolution three-dimensional (HR3D) terrain
data to U.S., coalition and host nation forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan
Harrison Donnelly
since 2004. Its biggest accomplishment has been the revival of combat
Editor
mapping, and the expectation that warfighters should have tactical and
urban scale HR3D terrain data at their disposal wherever they go, rather than merely data at strategic and
operational scales.
BuckEye became the essential element of GEOINT in Afghanistan and Iraq because it was unclassified
and shareable. In a coalition war fighting environment that sought to achieve integrated operations with
uncleared host nation forces, it was the unclassified and shareable nature of the BuckEye data that drove
its widespread adoption.
USGIF, meanwhile, has become an important force in the defense, intelligence and homeland security
communities since its incorporation. It offers the annual GEOINT Symposium, regular networking events,
technical workshops, training opportunities, educational initiatives and other programs, all built on the
group’s three strategic pillars: build the community, advance the tradecraft, and accelerate innovation.
The foundation has grown from seven founding companies to nearly 240 member organizations, and
the GEOINT Symposium has become the largest intelligence event in the United States.
USGIF will commemorate its 10th GEOINT Symposium April 14-17 in Tampa, Fla. That in itself is a
story and a sign of the vitality of the geospatial industry, as the foundation staff and volunteers had on
short notice to pull together a rescheduled event following the
cancellation of last fall’s meeting due to the federal shutdown.

GEOINT for
the Battlefield
The U.K. Ministry of Defence has given initial
approval to a battlefield geospatial intelligence system
designed to provide significantly improved situational
awareness for the British Army.
Lockheed Martin U.K. and Team Socrates, its industry
team, have now completed Tranche 1 of the Field
Deployable GEOINT (FDG), which is part of the overall
Picasso program. The Picasso program provides strategic
to tactical level mapping and digital geographic information and imagery-derived intelligence.
Following the success of the initial program, Team
Socrates has been awarded FDG Tranche 2A, which will
provide additional FDG systems, a forward map distribution point and further tactical map distribution points
(TMDP) capability.
FDG delivers a data centric GEOINT management,
discovery, dissemination and exploitation capability that
addresses the deployable requirements of the U.K.’s Joint
Force Intelligence Group, including the provision of
mobile and maneuverable working environments at the
tactical level. The system includes a fleet of 11 tactical
information and geospatial analysis capabilities—a
two-man, self-contained, tactical exploitation working
environment (container) used for collection and GEOINT
analysis mounted on vehicles. FDG also delivered three
vehicle-mounted containers equipped as TMDP, operated
by a two-man team.

Trusting Your Instincts
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has announced its first
challenge contest, INSTINCT, to advance understanding of human interactions that involve trust and trustworthiness. INSTINCT—Investigating
Novel Statistical Techniques to Identify Neurophysiological Correlates
of Trustworthiness—is conducted in partnership with the Air Force
Research Laboratory.
“Trust plays a fundamental role in many human relationships, organizations, and behaviors,” said Adam Russell, IARPA program manager. “Knowing
who can be trusted is essential for everyday interactions and is especially vital
for many intelligence community missions and organizations. Improving this
capability to know whom to trust could have profound benefits for the IC, as
well as for society in general.”
In 2010, IARPA launched its Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of
Trustworthiness (TRUST) program to identify promising technologies and
approaches that could significantly advance the IC’s capabilities to assess who
can be trusted under conditions and in contexts relevant to the IC, even in the
presence of stress and/or deception.
INSTINCT seeks to sponsor the development and testing of innovative
algorithms that can use data from one participant to accurately predict
whether their partner will make trusting decisions and/or act in a trustworthy
manner. Challenge “solvers” are given access to sample data against which
they may train and test their algorithms. Solvers are then asked to use their
algorithms to submit predictions for an evaluation data set. The algorithm
that produces the most accurate predictions will receive $25,000, with $15,000
offered for second place and $10,000 for third.

PEOPLE
Air Force Brigadier General
Francis X. Taylor (Ret.) has been
nominated for undersecretary of
homeland security for intelligence
and analysis. His past government
service has included assistant
secretary of state for diplomatic
security and director of the
Office of Foreign Missions, and
commander for the Air Force
Office of Special Investigations
from 1996 to 2001.
Pamela Drew, president of Exelis’
Information Systems business,
has received the additional
title of executive vice president
of the company. Her previous
industry experience includes
TASC, where she was senior vice

www.GIF-kmi.com

Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

president of strategic capabilities
and technology, and Northrop
Grumman, where she was
sector vice president of business
development for the Mission
Systems sector.
Dr. Roger Mason, former
assistant director of national
intelligence for systems and
resource analyses for the Office
of the Director of National
Intelligence, has joined Noblis, a
provider of science, technology
and strategy services, as senior
vice president of national security
and intelligence.
The SI Organization has
appointed Michael Polmar

as senior vice president of
business development. Prior
to joining the SI, he has been
senior vice president, business
development of ManTech’s
Technical Services Group,
and vice president for business
development and marketing
at SAIC’s Intelligence and
Information Systems business
unit.
Boundless has named Paul
Ramsey as vice president,
product management, where he
will be responsible for leading
the direction and development
of the OpenGeo Suite and related
Boundless products.

Mark Sarojak

Pixia, a provider of highperformance scalable large data
access solutions, has hired Mark
Sarojak as vice president of sales,
Western U.S. and APAC, where he
will be responsible for expanding
the company’s direct and indirect
sales channels in these expanding
markets.

GIF 12.2 | 3

4 | GIF 12.2

www.GIF-kmi.com

Synthetic aperture radar and other GEOINT data offer keys to
understanding the increasingly important Arctic region.

As the Arctic region, with its diminishing icepack
and resulting increase in maritime and other human
activity, becomes a more important part of the strategic picture of the United States and other nations, geospatial technology is playing a vital role in improving
knowledge of its forbidding sea- and landscapes.
President Obama last year issued a national policy articulating the linkage between events in the
Arctic and enduring U.S. national interests, and the
Department of Defense followed up with a policy statement addressing â&#x20AC;&#x153;potential changes in the future

www.GIF-kmi.com

By Henry Canaday
GIF Correspondent

security environment due to the increased access and
activity in the region.â&#x20AC;?
The good news is that satellite imagery, synthetic
aperture radar (SAR) and other methods are providing
far more information about the Arctic and still-isolated
but potentially resource-rich Antarctica than that for
which explorers like John Franklin and Robert Scott
gave their lives. But the poles remain the hardest parts
of earth to survey, because of both extreme weather and
technological challenges involving communications
and other issues.

GIF 12.2 | 5

Although SAR imaging of the poles has been completed, mostly
for defense needs, SAR imaging for civilian purposes has been
expensive. That may be changing, however, as the Europeans put
up a new set of satellites that will provide much more SAR and
other data.
Moreover, getting polar images to ships in real time, which
is one of the crucial safety uses of polar intelligence, still faces
big communication hurdles. That problem too may be eased,
at least for the Arctic, as Canada pursues a communications
satellite initiative.

Military, Navigation Needs
Polar intelligence serves a number of purposes, including military and security, navigation and maritime safety, and scientific
research.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency maintains a portfolio of nautical charts and data that enable the U.S. military to project
power and safely navigate the Arctic. NGA is also part of the internationally coordinated World-Wide Navigational Warning Service
responsible for navigational warnings in the Arctic.
For scientific purposes, the Polar Geospatial Center (PGC)
at the University of Minnesota works with the National Science

NGA Sets Its Compass
North (and South)

Foundation (NSF). PGC and NSF make extensive use of U.S. commercial satellite imagery to support work in Antarctica, Alaska and
the Arctic. They have also used some airborne light detection and
ranging capabilities (LiDAR).
PGC is an unclassified organization that works under cooperative agreements with NSF, NASA and the Fish and Wildlife Service,
explained Principal Investigator Paul Morin. “We help land LC-130s
in remote areas, and we do biological censuses and elevation models,” he said.
PGC uses images from the NGA’s commercial imagery program,
provided by Digital Globe. PGC monitors changes in coast lines and
permafrost, analyzes and passes data on to hundreds of other federally funded researchers on a variety of topics, including glaciology.
Until four years ago, PGC had no seamless coverage of the Arctic
and Antarctic. Now it does, from electro-optical (EO) satellites of
Digital Globe. “It gives sub-meter detail, 50 centimeter panchromatic and multi-spectral to two to four meters,” Morin noted. “That
is key to us, because before we just had NASA at 10 to 15 meters.”
The data comes from mostly polar orbiting satellites, so as long
as the sun is up, the satellite can take still pictures of the same spot
several times a year. This repetition is important because the Arctic
landscape changes so much during the year, between frozen and
thawed and back again.

(Editor’s Note: Following are edited excerpts of information about NGA
polar programs, as provided by the Office of Corporate Communications.)

The Maritime Safety Office (SH) of the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency maintains a worldwide portfolio of unclassified and classified standard nautical charts, bathymetric charts,
digital nautical charts, tactical ocean data and nautical publications that provide all required navigational products for the U.S.
military to project power and safely navigate the globe, including the Arctic region.
In providing and maintaining this global portfolio, SH works
in close partnership with other trusted foreign hydrographic
offices and has bilateral exchange agreements in place to burden-share and transfer maritime safety information data, products and services with each other. These agreements include in
some cases NGA-adopted foreign national charts providing coverage for the Arctic region and other areas of the world.
The Geodetic Surveys Division (SNS) provides geodetic survey support to the Department of Defense in the Alaska and
Greenland (Thule) areas of the Arctic region. SNS is a fielddeployable surveying office that provides precise geophysical
and geodetic positioning information. SNS provides support in the
form of airfield surveys, missile launches, and radar positioning
and alignment.
NGA/SH maintains a global data store, to include the Arctic
region, of bathymetric holdings that include unclassified and
classified U.S. and foreign hydrographic office single-beam
surveys, multi-beam surveys, and ship track-line data. Some
of these bathymetric data holdings have been processed and
are currently included on NGA maritime products, but some
have not.

6 | GIF 12.2

The annual Canada/U.S. (CANUS) meeting attempts to
address both topographic and hydrographic surveying and
charting for the Arctic, mainly concerning the seamless landwater interface in the region. CANUS membership consists of
national and defense mapping, charting and imagery agencies, and is collectively responsible for ensuring a collaborative and coordinated response to requirements for geospatial
information, imagery and services. The group’s hydrographic
panel is focused on safety of navigation and regional cooperation issues that include co-production activities for nautical
charts and maritime safety information data sharing within the
Arctic region.
NGA/SH is one of three internationally recognized hydrographic authorities in the U.S., along with NOAA and the Naval
Oceanographic Office. Senior analysts and managers from SH
are included as part of the official U.S. delegation to International
Hydrographic Organization (IHO) regional hydrographic commission meetings, including the Arctic Regional Hydrographic
Commission (ARHC).
Member states in the ARHC, which meets annually, are
Russia, Denmark, Canada, Norway and the U.S. The group is
concerned about maritime safety in the region, and to that goal
members attempt to work out hydrographic survey coverage,
nautical charting and safe ship routing.
NGA/SH is part of the World-Wide Navigational Warning
Service (WWNWS), which now includes coverage and assignment of responsibilities for navigational warnings in the Arctic
region.

www.GIF-kmi.com

for scientists. The center has three stations in the Antarctic, but
There is an “absolutely astonishing difference” between the
uses Air Greenland on that vast island.
new images and what was available before, Morin said. The new EO
The big need now, Morin said, is for radar images, since the
imagery can shoot the poles in stereo, and PGC can extract 2-meter
Arctic and Antarctic are dark half the year and can be cloudy any
elevation models. “We never had that before, it’s very accurate,”
season. The European Space Agency (ESA) plans shortly to launch
Morin said. “It’s almost LiDAR, but without the logistics of LiDAR.
its radar satellite, Sentinel. “But we don’t know their data policies,
You don’t have to fly into remote places where if you get into trouand these are not our assets,” Morin said, adding that like all satelble, there are not a lot of places to land.”
lites, radar satellites are expensive.
Indeed, U.S. Arctic researchers once had to fly many reconnaissance missions just to see where their aircraft could land.
“Now we have images of caves, rocks, crevasses
Radar Imagery
and ice,” Morin said. “We give these to scientists
and they know where to land instead of wandering
Radar images of the poles are hardly nonexistent.
around.”
For example, MDA, an international communicaPGC has been exploiting these improved images,
tions and information company with roots in Canada,
mapping all of Alaska and 85 percent of Greenland.
operates the RADARSAT-2 satellite, which provides
Half to two-thirds of the Antarctic has been mapped,
imagery at spatial resolutions from 1 to 100 meters
while parts of Canada and the Siberian Arctic
and covers 144 to 250,000 square kilometers in a sinare essentially unmapped from an unclassified
gle scene. RADARSAT-2 imaging supports single, co-,
perspective.
cross- and quad-polarization options.
To do its mapping, PGC does orthorectification
“With 17 imaging modes, RADARSAT-2 provides
Herb Saterlee
and elevation models. Much of this work has to be
the greatest flexibility of any SAR mission, enabling
automated, creating big-data challenges for the center, which howcustomers to select the right combination of resolution, polarization
ever has received some data-storage and processing resources from
and swath width to address their imaging requirements,” said Herb
NSF and NASA.
Saterlee, MDA’s chief executive officer.
PGC provides some support for the New York National Guard
MDA offers polar intelligence provided by RADARSAT-2,
LC-130s, but it mostly helps with glaciology, biology and logistics
including ice monitoring; strategic and tactical imaging of Arctic

Five new Arctic NAVAREAs were officially established in
2012, with coordination responsibilities assigned to Canada,
Russia and Norway. NGA still maintains oversight on the
WWNWS by holding the chairmanship of this IHO/IMO sponsored service and the governing IHO WWNWS Sub-Committee.
NGA’s GeoSciences (Gravity) Division (SNA) has been a primary lead, along with the Danish National Space Institute (DTUSpace), in developing the Arctic Gravity Project (ArcGP), an
effort among 10 countries to compile a public domain grid of the
Arctic gravity field north of 64 degrees north. ArcGP 5’x5’ gravity and geoid data has been available to the general public since
2000, with one update made in 2006.
NGA and DTU-Space, along with the University of AlaskaFairbanks, plan to develop a new ArcGP gravity grid (5’x5’) by
the end of 2014, taking advantage of a wealth of new gravity
and bathymetric information in the Arctic. SNA supports gravity data collections in the Arctic on board the USCG Healy,
and continually collects data from a variety of additional airborne and marine platforms in the Arctic to meet DoD navigation
requirements.
All of this gravity data is incorporated into NGA’s gravity products to DoD, and is also utilized by the U.S. in the UN
Convention on Law of the Sea negotiations. SNA also includes
the latest bathymetry from the International Bathymetric Chart
of the Arctic Ocean and other sources into a digital bathymetric and elevation data product used by NGA and its customers.
NGA also is active in the Antarctic area, including Operation
Deep Freeze (ODF), a joint military program supporting scientific

www.GIF-kmi.com

research on that continent. In collaboration with mission partners, NGA analysts produce graphic and digital instrument flight
procedures to ensure safety of navigation for all ODF airborne
operations. As airlift operations expand, and more air carriers
become involved, this support continues to become even more
essential. ODF takes place during the austral summer, between
October and February, when weather conditions are more favorable but still unpredictable.
During these months, NGA products are used by several
multi-national operators, including the U.S. and New Zealand
air forces, NASA, SAFAIR, and the Australia Antarctic Division.
During a typical flying season, the U.S. Joint Task Force alone
flies more than 350 missions, carrying some 5,800 passengers
and 13 million pounds of cargo.
NGA began providing flight information publication support
to ODF in 2006. The bulk of aeronautical navigation support is
provided between mid-August and mid-November. During this
time period, graphics terminals analysts produce instrument
approach procedures, standard instrument departures, and
standard terminal arrival routes to the three primary airfields at
McMurdo Station as well as South Pole Station and several base
camps throughout the continent.
Without NGA products, ODF could not safely resupply
research programs in the region. Outside of ODF, NGA products have also been relied upon for emergency air-drops and
medevac operations during the treacherous winter season. NGA
instrument flight procedures are critical to the safety of navigation worldwide, and even more so for Antarctic operations.

GIF 12.2 | 7

constraints; data for geographic information systems that can be
integrated into operational maritime systems; data for safe navigation through ice-infested waters; fusion of sensor data so maritime customers can quickly monitor areas from ports to coastal
approaches on the open ocean; and multi-sensor threat detection
for security organizations.
MDA’s capabilities will be further enhanced with the launch
of the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), which comprises
three satellites providing round-the-clock coverage. “Information
obtained from RCM can include repeat imaging of the same area
at different times of day, dramatically improving the frequency of
monitoring coastal zones, northern territories, arctic waterways and
other areas of strategic and defense interest,” Saterlee said.
RCM will also incorporate automatic identification systems,
which combined with SAR will enable identification of ships
worldwide.
The biggest remaining challenge in exploiting all this polar data
is communications, Saterlee noted, especially systems that can stably handle large amounts of data beyond 75 degrees of latitude.
Several northern nations are studying the launch of polar-orbiting
satellites to fill this communication gap in the Arctic.
The Canadian Department of National Defense, meanwhile, is
seeking additional X-, Ka-, and UHF-band satellite coverage in the
Arctic, recently issuing a request for information for a polar communications and weather (PCW) mission. For the Arctic, PCW would
seek to provide reliable 24-by-7 tactical communications in UHF,
reliable communications in the X- and Ka-bands, frequent circumpolar weather imaging, and space-weather monitoring.

SAR Development

Greenland’s Glacier Petermann (shown here in an image captured by an Airbus Defence and Space
Pléiades satellite) “calves” a massive block of ice. Geospatial technology is playing a key role in
monitoring such changes in the Arctic region. [Image courtesy of Airbus Defence and Space]

More and better SAR is coming from Europe, including from
Raw SAR and other satellite data must be interpreted and comAirbus Defence and Space, through the geo-intelligence program
bined with other data, as in weather forecasting, to be useful,
line of its communication, intelligence and security business line.
Johnson said, adding, “You need to understand the physics.”
“We have been developing SAR for several decades,” explained
The Copernicus program will provide the kind of long-term data
Mick Johnson, an Airbus executive who also serves as director of the
needed by climate scientists, and sponsors want to make it a comCentre for Earth Observation Instrumentation. Development began
mercial service as well, for example for oil rig safety and to protect
with ESA’s two European Remote Sensing satellites, launched in
ships against icebergs. “There are some things that the Sentinels
1991 and 1995, and will be continued with the Copernicus program’s
will provide that are high value and you cannot get now,” Johnson
first two Sentinels.
said. “Not many people will use them, but they are
In addition to seeing at night and through clouds,
high value.”
SAR can provide more quantitative data. For examAirbus’ Infoterra unit is responsible for delivering
ple, the current CryoSat satellite combines SAR and
Arctic services from Copernicus. Communications
altimeters to measure ice thickness.
are still a challenge, since most communication satSentinel SAR will improve performance over
ellites do not cross the poles and must thus send
its predecessors, with better spatial resolution and
signals obliquely, through the polar atmosphere.
increased information content, said Johnson.
“Everything is tougher at the poles,” Johnson noted.
A set of 10 satellite missions, Copernicus repreThe Copernicus program represents Europe’s
sents a shift from scientific to operational constellanext step into gathering polar intelligence, said Mark
tions, while also giving users confidence in long-term
Drinkwater, head of ESA’s Mission Science Division.
continuity. “You can plan on these being there for 20
Mark Drinkwater
Sentinel 1A, a SAR satellite, will be launched in late
years, and you will know the data will be coming in
March or early April 2014, while Sentinel 1B, also carrying SAR
the future,” Johnson said.
equipment, will go up in 2015. “These will give us continuous
Copernicus consists of two SAR satellites, two optical satellites,
C-band images for the next 15 years or more,” Drinkwater said.
two for ocean surface and temperature, and two pairs for measur“There will be more data once both 1A and 1B are deployed.”
ing air quality. Johnson said he would like to offer more frequent
Drinkwater noted that MDA’s RADARSAT-2 is a commercial
updates of polar images, but for that more than two of each satelmission, whose data acquisition is largely driven by paying customlite type would have to be operating simultaneously. “If we could get
ers. “Moreover, the imaging mode over a specific geographic region
a low-cost satellite, getting half a dozen at a time would be ideal.”
8 | GIF 12.2

www.GIF-kmi.com

is not routinely in a fixed swath mode/resolution, or polarization. This makes applications
based on a robust time-series of equivalentmode data quite challenging.”
In contrast, Sentinel-1 will provide routine,
free and open data acquisition, in a set of standard acquisition modes over any given zone in
order to allow services to flourish.

New Capabilities
Other Copernicus satellites may also be
important for polar intelligence. ESA’s CryoSat
is already measuring ice thickness. The two
Sentinel 3 satellites will do radar altimetry
year round.
Altimetry depicts the extent of sea ice and
the wave environment. “When we can define
the extent of ice area, that will allow much better intelligence for ship routing and safety,”
Drinkwater explained. Sentinel 3 will also
carry imaging instruments for sunlit landscapes and provide better information on ice
conditions.
Sentinel 1 and 3 are the two main
Copernicus satellites important for the Arctic
and Antarctic. But ESA also has the MetOp satellite, working with NOAA in joint polar orbiting to improve weather forecasting. “The U.S.
does p.m., and we do a.m.,” Drinkwater said.
“We already have approval from European
Union members for MetOp’s second generation,
so we will have lots of observation systems for
the next 25 years.”
Sentinel 1’s SAR images will provide important data for ship routing through marginal or
sea ice. The SAR capability offers two possibilities. It can do a wide area swath of 400 kilometers with 90-meter resolution, or give a slightly
narrower interferometric swath with much Very high resolution satellites, such as this next generation Pleiades unit in the clean room in Toulouse, France, will be a key resource
in tracking Arctic changes. [Image courtesy of Airbus Defence and Space]
better spatial resolution.
important, since Sentinel will generate about 2.4 terabytes a day of
SAR also makes possible multiple polarization information. “Ice
raw data.
forecasting services like to have two polarizations for dividing ice
Sentinel will make civilian SAR data “routine and robust,”
and water and dividing ice into classes like old, newly formed and
Drinkwater said. “You also need vessel identification, so we are conyoung ice,” Drinkwater said. “This is important for operations and
sidering putting AIS on satellites. Then you would only need satelship routing.”
lite-to-ship communication, to make all this operational by getting
These capabilities will be useful for monitoring ice drifts and
it to the end user, the end point of all this.”
pressure environments, and that in turn will help in ship routCanada’s PCW program may provide that crucial, last coming. At present, vessels cannot be sent into areas of even thin ice,
munication link, at least in the Arctic, Drinkwater suggested.
if pressures will drive the ice toward shore and possibly trap the
In any case, more and better images at night and during cloudy
vessels. SAR imagery from Sentinel 1 will be available free from
weather are coming. “Civilian SAR is revolutionary: data every day
ESA to organizations that register on the Copernicus webpage, or
and every week.” O
make arrangements with the European Union for special access to
the data.
And, as part of Copernicus program, ESA will furnish MyOcean,
a special service for operational oceanography. MyOcean will offer
fundamental products and analytics from Sentinel, and data such
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly
at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives
as temperatures, currents and sea-ice conditions from which users
for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
can derive their own products. These interpretational services are
www.GIF-kmi.com

GIF 12.2 | 9

Sharing While Mobile
One of the key challenges facing developers of mobile devices is to ensure that they
can efficiently share the GEOINT data they collect and receive.
By Peter Buxbaum
GIF Correspondent

As geospatial intelligence, like so much else in the modern
world, increasingly integrates mobile technology into all aspects
of operations, one of the key challenges facing developers is
to ensure that the ubiquitous devices can efficiently share the
data they collect and receive. The goal is to enhance the utility
and effectiveness of GEOINT by bringing usersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;virtuallyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to
places of interest in near real time.
Progress in this area is proceeding on two fronts. The
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is working on standards
to enable the sharing of geospatial data over mobile devices.
Application developers in government and industry, meanwhile,
10 | GIF 12.2

are responding to the demand by creating programs that enable
the generation, analysis and dissemination of geospatial intelligence on tablets and smartphones.
Following open standards such as those promulgated by the
OGC enables systems to crunch data from a variety of sources
and to seamlessly harmonize processes to deliver synthesized
results. The OGC has several relevant standards in place that are
already being followed by mobile application developers, and has
four more in development that are directly focused on mobile.
There are also non-OGC standards that have been promulgated
that help geospatial application developers build their products.
www.GIF-kmi.com

OGC’s GeoPackage encoding specification, which was for“The newer potential standards are still a work in progress,
mally adopted by the organization in February, focuses on getand one of them is currently being voted on by OGC members,”
ting geospatial intelligence to mobile users.
said Lew Leinenweber, a project manager and software engineer
“In many cases, users may have connectivity but not enough
at OGC.
bandwidth to get all the material they might need, such as
The standards currently being considered include those that
detailed maps, imagery and feature data,” said Leinenweber.
specify the compilation of packages of geospatial data with light“The GeoPackage encoding specification provides the ability to
weight protocols; allow any client device to capture geospatial
upload the appropriate collection of materials in a
information generated by another device; facilitate
compact lightweight encoding format to a disconthe synchronization of geospatial data stores with
nected device in advance, and then be able to use
geospatial data uploaded from mobile devices; and
that in the field. A low-bandwidth user would have
work on lightweight encoding languages.
its own capability to update intelligence from the
Industry members of OGC have shared their
field. When returning to a home location, the data
input in the creation of the potential mobile stanfrom the device would be merged with the data
dards. “We have attended meetings hosted by the
on the server so that it can be disseminated and
OGC and the National Geospatial-Intelligence
exploited on a broader scale as necessary.”
Agency,” said Michael Zipperer, a program manA related standard called Context, which would
ager at BAE Systems. “We help shape the stanbe
used
in conjunction with the GeoPackage standards by providing OGC with feedback on the work
Michael Zipperer
dard, would allow any client to capture a record
being done on the standards.”
generated by another device. This would allow one client, which
may have captured features, maps and data from a sensor obserCapability Constraints
vation service to form a common operating picture, to transmit
data to anther device so that its user can obtain the same view.
One purpose of the OGC standards is to smooth the process
“The second machine would understand exactly what was
of running a data-heavy geospatial application on a small platseen by the first machine and would be able to connect to the
form such as a mobile device. “You have to shrink the capabilsame URLs and information feeds to establish the same view on
ities of the application so you don’t overwhelm the processing
the other machine,” Leinenweber explained.
power of the device,” said James Phillips, director of the geospaAnother standard being drafted deals with the problem of
tial intelligence solutions business area at Exelis.
how geospatial data from a mobile device can be synchronized
“Mobile devices also require a simpler user interface, and
with a central data store. “It is a matter of maintaining consisthere are also bandwidth constraints,” he added. “There is
tent data—not causing any conflicts, not eliminating features
always a tradeoff on the richness of the application versus being
that shouldn’t be eliminated and not producing new ones,” said
able to provide some kind of application.”
Leinenweber.
Following open standards solves some of the problems assoThe GeoPackage standard requires lightweight encoding
ciated with mobile application development, noted Daemon
formats, which are the subject of another OGC standard-inMorrell, director of federal business at Brocade. “With open
progress. “Mobile devices generally have lower levels of prostandards, you can have multiple vendors working together
cessing power than powerful computers and databases in a
to provide solutions. Proprietary architectures get stale very
server location,” said Leinenweber. “We are creating an encoding
quickly. Open standards allow people more time to be innovaprofile for JSON and other lightweight encoding formats.
tive because they are devoting less time to the maintenance of
Having lightweight protocols is an important aspect of making
the architecture.”
geo-packaging work.”
The incipient OGC standards are not yet available to be used
by application developers, but BAE and Exelis both incorporate
existing OGC and non-OGC standards in their mobile geospaEasy Access
tial tools.
“Ours are built based on open standards,” said Zipperer. “We
One company active in this field is BAE Systems, which
use a variety of open source packaging for our internal code
has developed two mobile geospatial applications related to its
as well as open standards for obtaining and displaying search
Geospatial eXploitation Products (GXP) Xplorer server-based
results.”
product: GXP Xplorer Mobile and GXP Xplorer Snap. GXP repSearches on BAE mobile applications are done via JavaScript
resents a series of COTS software capabilities that use imagery
Object Notation (JSON), a lightweight data interchange format.
from commercial, satellite and tactical sources for image exploiHTML5, the latest version of the markup language used for
tation, mapping, analysis and data management. The two mobile
structuring and presenting content on Internet browsers, is also
apps are based on that server and communicate with it.
important to Exelis geospatial applications. “We are building
“We wanted to build products to make geospatial informageospatial tools to be run on browsers,” said Phillips.
tion as easily accessible as humanly possible,” said Zipperer.
“We are beginning to get more and more feedback that
GXP Xplorer Mobile is a tablet-based product that allows
mobile apps are nice, but just running on a browser is preusers to easily report and find geospatially relevant information.
ferred,” Phillips reported, noting that downloading apps require
“It is for the guy with boots on the ground to use to find imaga good deal more approvals than accessing a tool over a browser,
ery, reports and anything else that might be relevant to him or
Phillips explained.
her while moving around on location,” said Zipperer.
www.GIF-kmi.com

GIF 12.2 | 11

Mobile App Tracks Overhead Eyes

By Harrison Donnelly, GIF Editor

analysis. The mobile app offers a customized interface specifA new mobile application developed by Riverside
ically tailored to each mission and providing only the exact
Research is providing critical situational awareness to operainformation needed by the warfighter.
tors in the field by letting them know when their area can be
Riverside was driven to develop the mobile app by
seen—and perhaps as importantly, not be seen—by overhead
what it has seen in the community, which is a
imaging satellites.
movement to get data closer to the operator,
Created by the not-for-profit compaexplained John Ploschnitznig, MADLab director
ny’s Modeling and Application Development
and senior technical adviser.
Laboratory (MAD Lab), Seamless Opportunities
“Our goal is to provide the necessary data to
for Mobile GEOINT is a mobile GEOINT appliallow a customer to still take advantage of what
cation that enables users to determine satellite
we can do in a very sensitive environment, and
access times—that is, when passing overhead
make available to them to help support what
assets will be able to provide them tactically
they are trying to achieve outside, be it operrelevant imagery information. If needed, it can
ational, special operations or a special testing
also tell them it is safe to move around unseen
environment,” he said.
by the growing constellation of orbiting senJohn Ploschnitznig
The app begins by harvesting location inforsors operated by a wide range of international
mation, which then goes back through the secure network to
interests.
support an information request. The system can then tell the
The Seamless Opportunities app leverages the power and
user when a certain satellite will have access to his position,
security of the company’s client-based Automated Collection
without divulging sensitive details of the satellite or its spePlanning Tool (ACPT), which manages all the relevant satelcific position.
lite position and capability parameters needs to perform the

A scenario illustrating the utility of the GXP Xplorer Mobile
application might be a mission focused on disaster response. A
commander might send teams out to scout out problems areas
and report back.
“Our theory was that they should be able to report back immediately over a 3G network or something like that,” said Zipperer.
“They go out and see something that needs to be addressed, such
as a downed power line, an IED, or a building of interest, depending on what their mission is. They can snap a picture of it, make
some quick notes, and upload that to the server. All users across
the enterprise, including users of other mobile devices, can see
and act on that result.”
Other users can use the application’s search utilities to discover imagery and information relevant to their jobs or set
up automatic alerts, based on the identification of key words,
that will push that information to them via email or text message. “Users that set up notifications will be notified instantaneously of the availability of the imagery or information so
that they can act on it appropriately to the given situation,” said
Zipperer. “Others can discover that information by using our data
discovery tool.”
Data discovery can be accomplished with a mapping utility.
The system can identify all areas of potential interest within a
given radius of the user’s location. Searches can also be accomplished with key words to add an additional filtering layer to the
geospatial context.
“Users want to be able to drill down to the areas that matter
to them most,” said Zipperer. “Geospatial is good, but you want to
be able to do more.”
The imagery displayed on a tablet by way of the Xplorer
Mobile application can be viewed and manipulated in a variety of
ways. “Users can open images, pan and zoom on them to discern
whether the area has changes since they last looked at it,” said
Zipperer. “A road that was present before a natural disaster may
12 | GIF 12.2

no longer be there. The point is to give the users the most relevant
possible information for them to do their jobs.”
Users can also use the application to produce intelligence
products such as PowerPoint presentations. “These presentations
are also accessible to other users,” said Zipperer. “That is a good
thing to have access to because it contains all the information
that went into a decision process.”
The GXP Xplorer Snap application is focused on users of
smartphones, as opposed to tablets. “Not everyone has a tablet,
and they are too cumbersome to use to take pictures in some
situations,” said Zipperer. “Snap focuses on reporting alone.
Personnel out in the field can use this app to take pictures with
their smartphones and upload the images for use by other users.
They can take a picture, write some notes, and it is automatically
geo- and time-stamped and uploaded to the server.”
BAE Systems has sold its GXP servers to the Army, Marine
Corps and Air Force, and the Mobile app is in use internationally in conjunction with the U.S. server assets. “The Mobile app is
being used in a kind of a symbiotic relationship with a local government,” said Zipperer. “We have people over there working with
that local government to exchange information. That foreign government has a voracious appetite for mobile capacity and is one of
our largest customers.”

Imagery Platform
ITT Exelis has made its Jagwire solution for the management
and dissemination of tactical imagery and video available on a
mobile platform. Jagwire Mobile allows users, such as soldiers
operating in environments where bandwidth is limited, to capture, process and rapidly access imagery and data from remote
networks.
“The Jagwire Mobile solution offers much of the same functionality of the Jagwire enterprise version, which is important
www.GIF-kmi.com

“All you care about is what time of day will that satellite
be able to support your need, whether a military operation
or a field experiment. The goal is to be able to reach back
and use the specific information about a satellite or system
of interest, and have it tell you the information that we have
pre-planned in a safe environment. So when you push button
#1, it will tell you that what you care about happens between
1 and 1:15. It will tell you when a satellite has access to you,
but also when those satellites don’t have access to you. So it
answers both when you can be seen and when you can’t,”
Ploschnitznig said.
Each scenario is set up back at the lab, using the ACPT to
configure each of the buttons in the mobile app. When the
buttons are configured, they are set up to give users only a
handful of options. So if they push button #1, the system recognizes that as one or more satellites, and indicates when they
have access to the user.
One key to success, Ploschnitznig made clear, is the information that is not included. “When you look at what we do
in support of a customer with our current ACPT, that’s a very

for users in bandwidth-constricted or hostile areas,” said Phillips.
“Jagwire Mobile uses advanced data compression techniques to
allow video and image capture and processing into the Jagwire
repository, where the imagery is indexed and becomes searchable
by other users on shared networks.”
For example, Exelis has leveraged the Jagwire Mobile platform to create an application that transforms night vision goggles
into sensors, the output of which can be viewed by commanders.
“What warfighters in the field are seeing through the night vision
goggles appears as live full motion video to the enterprise,” said
Phillips. “Commanders can see what soldiers are seeing. The night
vision goggles are functioning like a sensor on an UAV, or a wearable mobile device.”
At the same time, commanders can push information back to
the goggles. “By using location services and other input such as
signal intelligence, commanders could, for example, send an image
of a person of interest with a message to the warfighter to be on the
lookout for that person. These are seen by the solider as an overlay
on the images he sees through the goggle,” Phillips said.
“The network has become the highway for all mobile applications,” said Morrell. “In the case of military and intelligence
applications, priorities, communities of interest, security and
classification levels have to be taken into account. Standardsbased networks provide the infrastructure that can handle new
loads so that when new applications are introduced they can be
up and running quickly. Implementations that used to take five
or six weeks to provision can now be done in a couple of hours.”

Mobile Comes First
The continued development of standards for mobile geospatial
applications, according to Phillips, will facilitate proliferation of
those types of tools, because the mobile apps will be built from the
ground up. “The key thing we are seeing is that mobile is coming
www.GIF-kmi.com

sophisticated tool with a lot of features. So you ask what you
can remove from a query so that you don’t degrade the
data to the point where it’s not useful. To do that, we had to
be able to identify the basic essential pieces of information, and capture that in a query that will be accepted by
our system.
“You have to tell the engineers that you know they want to
do a thousand things, but you have to hold them back and tell
them to focus on just five pieces of information,” he added.
The hardest part in doing an app like this, Ploschnitznig
acknowledged, is to make sure that the results are something
that an operator can easily interpret.
“That’s a very difficult thing, not technically, but how to set
up the colors and how you want the operator to manipulate
the software,” he explained. “Many times, operators are wearing big gloves or are carrying a lot of other equipment. They
want the ability to easily work through the application, with
big buttons and a simple interface. An operator can be overwhelmed with information, so our goal is to give him only the
information he needs at the right time.”

first. User experiences will be built specifically for the mobile
device instead of a mobile user trying to interface with desktop
application over a mobile browser. Going from large to small is a
lot harder than starting small and growing it bigger.”
In addition, geospatial mobile applications need to focus on
functions that make the best use of mobile, according to Greg
Eoyang, president of daVinci, a subsidiary of Intelligent Decisions
that focuses on the mobile space. In order to avoid connectivity issues, “dense pieces like maps can be loaded on the device,”
he said. “The interaction with the network occurs when an event
occurs that needs to be examined geospatially.
“Some things can be done better on a mobile device than on a
laptop or desktop computer,” Eoyang added. “Think about things
that can be done in 30 seconds or less and how they fit into business processes. Event management is an example. Human beings
are exceptionally quick at figuring out what events in a stream
they can ignore, what they have to act on now, and what they can
flag for follow-up when they get to the office. Providing this kind
of capability to an entire workforce can enable an organization to
make better decisions. Instead of having to synchronize everyone
and have them come to a meeting, you only have to ask them to
plug in their brains for 30 seconds.”
Assuming it is adopted, the GeoPackage standard could be
included by OGC members in the fabric of their commercial
products, although it is not mandatory. “Those companies can
use compliance testing tools provided by OGC to see if their new
products meets the standard’s requirements,” said Leinenweber.
“The compliance testing tool provides a score, and if the product
passes, the company gets a stamp of approval that it is compliant
and they can label and market their product that way.” O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly
at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives
for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.

GIF 12.2 | 13

INDUSTRY RASTER
Air Force Acquires Global
Positioning/Inertial Navigation Systems
The Air Force has awarded Northrop Grumman a contract for purchase and sustainment of its
embedded global positioning/inertial (EGI) navigation systems. Under a contract with a
potential value of up to $200 million, Northrop Grummanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suite of fiber-optic
gyro-based navigation systems are available for the U.S. Air Force, Army, Coast
Guard, Marine Corps and Navy as well as international customers. Northrop
Grumman will also provide platform integration, modernization, flight test
and technical support, training, depot repair and spares for its EGI. Northrop
Grumman offers a variety of embedded GPS/inertial navigation systems to meet
unique customer needs worldwide. Products such as the LN-251 and LN-260
feature a fully integrated, tightly coupled GPS inertial design for superior accuracy, in addition to open, modular architecture for greater adaptability.
Joyce Chang;
joyce.chang@ngc.com

Image-delivery Software Upgrade
Enables Web Browser Export
LizardTech, a provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, has launched Express Server
9 software. Express Server, which is imagedelivery software for compressed raster imagery,
including multispectral imagery, uses patented
technology to reduce storage costs, decrease
image loading times and handle thousands of
image requests, all without sacrificing visual
quality. The latest version of Express Server
comes equipped with the ExpressZip Web application for exporting imagery straight from the
Web browser. Now, users can view all of their
collections and query by location, keyword,
projection and more. If users need to take

their imagery on the go, they can use the
built-in selection tools to export their regions
of interest. The entire ExpressZip application is
open source and completely customizable. In
addition, the improved upgrade functionality
automates the process of migrating all image
catalogs so users do not need to manually
update thousands of catalogs when installing
a new version of Express Server. There is
no need to re-create existing image catalogs;
instead, administrators just point Express
Server to the existing catalog database and
click Upgrade.
Justyna Bednarski;
jbednarski@lizardtech.com

Mobile App Shows
Overhead Imaging Satellites
Orbit Logic has made its SpyMeSat
mobile app, previously available only for
iPhone, available for Android devices. The
SpyMeSat app provides notifications when
imaging satellites are overhead and may
be taking your picture. A dynamic map
shows orbit tracks and the location of
satellites with upcoming passes over the
user-specified location. The SpyMeSat app
uses NORAD orbit data published online
by www.celestrak.com and available public
information about commercial and international imaging satellites to compute and

14 | GIF 12.2

dynamically display imaging satellite overflights and pass information. The app user
can drill down to see additional details
about each imaging opportunity, and the
app provides a page describing each satellite
for those who want to learn more. SpyMeSat
users can configure the app to enable or
disable individual satellites, change the location of interest, enable or disable various
notification options, and specify the resolution limit for computed passes.
Alex Herz;
alex.herz@orbitlogic.com

Integration
Completed on
Next-Generation
Sensing Satellite
Ball Aerospace and Technologies
Corp. has completed integration of
WorldView-3, the next generation
commercial remote-sensing satellite
being built for DigitalGlobe. WorldView-3,
the fourth remote-sensing satellite
built for DigitalGlobe by Ball, is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg AFB,
Calif., this summer. With the imagery
sensor and associated electronics now
integrated, the completed satellite bus
is ready for system-level performance
testing, followed by thermal vacuum and
environmental testing. WorldView-3 is
the first multi-payload, super-spectral,
high-resolution commercial satellite for
earth observations and advanced geospatial solutions. In addition to the satellite
bus, Ball Aerospace is providing an atmospheric instrument called CAVIS, which
stands for cloud, aerosol, water vapor, ice,
snow. CAVIS will monitor the atmosphere
and provide correction data to improve
WorldView-3â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagery when it images
earth objects through haze, soot, dust
or other obscurants. CAVIS has also been
integrated with the spacecraft.
Roz Brown;
media@ball.com

www.GIF-kmi.com

Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

Modernized GPS to Provide Increased Accuracy for Military Users
Exelis has successfully completed several
software upgrades for the new Global Positioning
System Next Generation Operational Control
System (GPS OCX). Integration and testing
were recently conducted on iteration 1.5 of the
OCX navigation, encryption and Mission Upload
Generator (MUG) software. The new version
of GPS software will help ground controllers better understand the satellites’ exact

NGA to Replace
Library
Management
System
The National GeospatialIntelligence Agency GEOINT
Research Center (GRC) has awarded
a prime contract to PTFS for a
program called ILS Next. ILS Next
replaces NGA’s legacy Voyager library
management system, which has been
in operation for over a decade. PTFS
is supplying its COTS ArchivalWare
Digital Library System (DLS) to
satisfy the stringent and complex
requirements of the contract. PTFS
will work closely with the staff
of the GRC to replace the legacy
Voyager bibliographic cataloging
system with ArchivalWare DLS. DLS
is a state-of-the-art digital collection management system developed
by PTFS that allows libraries and
information centers to administer
both print and digital collections
from a single application. PTFS’ DLS
enables ingest, cataloging, storage,
discovery, conversion, repurposing,
collection and assessment of geospatial and other multi-INT content
on all three NGA network domains.
PTFS’ expertise with hundreds of
different geospatial file formats will
help the GRC manage and share
geospatial data throughout the IC.
Robin Schaffer;
rschaffer@ptfs.com

www.GIF-kmi.com

positioning in space. The encryption software
is also designed to automatically code and
decode GPS signals, facilitating the exchange
of user information by securely transmitting
navigation payload data between the OCX
ground system and the orbiting constellation
of satellites. The MUG software is responsible
for creating spacecraft payload updates to
refresh the navigation data transmitted to all

GPS users. This data is typically generated
for each satellite multiple times a day and
helps to consistently minimize user error. The
new capabilities offered by GPS modernization
will provide military users increased accuracy,
availability, anti-jam power and international
interoperability.
Jane Khodos;
jane.khodos@exelisinc.com

Battlefield GEOINT System Offers
Improved Situational Awareness
The U.K. Ministry of Defence has
given initial approval to a battlefield
geospatial intelligence system designed
to provide significantly improved
situational awareness for the British
Army. Lockheed Martin U.K. and Team
Socrates, its industry team, have now
completed Tranche 1 of the Field
Deployable GEOINT (FDG), which is
part of the overall Picasso program.
The Picasso program provides strategic
to tactical level mapping and digital
geographic information and imageryderived intelligence. Following the
success of the initial program, Team
Socrates has been awarded FDG Tranche

2A, which will provide additional FDG
systems, a forward map distribution
point and further tactical map distribution points capability. FDG delivers
a data-centric GEOINT management,
discovery, dissemination and exploitation capability that addresses the deployable requirements of the U.K.’s Joint
Force Intelligence Group, including the
provision of mobile and maneuverable
working environments at the tactical
level.
Kailen Tuscano;
kailen.tuscano@lmco.com
Shaun McDougall;
shaun.mcdougall@lmco.com

Small, Low-Orbit Satellites
to Offer Three Daily Revisits
Space Systems/Loral (SSL) has received a
contract from Skybox Imaging to build an
advanced constellation of low Earth orbit (LEO)
satellites for Earth imaging. The contract award
helps SSL, a subsidiary of MDA that is best known
for its high-power geostationary communications satellites, to further expand its capabilities
building LEO imaging satellites and solutions.
SSL will build 13 small LEO satellites, each
about 60 by 60 by 95 centimeters and weighing roughly 120 kilograms, to be launched
in 2015 and 2016. These satellites, based on a Skybox design, will capture submeter color
imagery and up to 90-second clips of HD video with 30 frames per second. Once the 13
satellites are launched, Skybox will be able to revisit any point on Earth three times
per day.
Wendy Lewis;
wendy.lewis@sslmda.com

GIF 12.2 | 15

Intel Director

Q& A

Intel Must Be Part of War Winning, Not Just War Fighting

Rear Admiral Paul Becker
Director for Intelligence
Joint Chiefs of Staff
Rear Admiral Paul Becker has been the director for intelligence
(J2) on the Joint Chiefs of Staff since September 2013. Previous
flag assignments include director for intelligence with U.S. Pacific
Command, vice director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and director of intelligence for the International Security Assistance
Force Joint Command in Afghanistan.
Born in New York City in 1961, Becker is a graduate of Long
Island’s Deer Park High School and commissioned an intelligence
officer upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1983.
Significant afloat assignments include intelligence officer with
Attack Squadron 35 aboard USS Nimitz, temporary assignment
aboard battleship USS Iowa, intelligence operations officer for the
U.S. 6th Fleet aboard cruiser USS Belknap, and N2 with Carrier
Strike Group 7 aboard USS John C. Stennis.
Shore assignments include: analyst at the Chief of Naval
Operations Intelligence Plot; flag aide to the director of Naval
Intelligence; intelligence branch/assignments officer at the Bureau
of Personnel; federal executive fellow at the Fletcher School of Law
and Diplomacy; the American Embassy in Paris as the assistant U.S.
naval attaché; temporary assignment with the American Embassy
in Skopje, Macedonia, as the assistant defense attaché (during
Operation Allied Force), and the director of operations at the Joint
Intelligence Center Pacific, Hawaii.
In addition to service in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, his duty
with U.S. Central Command since 9/11 includes: commanding officer of CENTCOM’s Joint Intelligence Center in Tampa, Fla., from
2007 to 2009; director of intelligence (N2) for U.S. Naval Forces
Central Command in Bahrain from 2005 to 2007; intelligence watch
officer in the Combined Air Operations Center at Prince Sultan Air
Base in Saudi Arabia in 2003 during early Iraqi Freedom operations; and N2 for the Navy’s Task Force 50 in the Northern Arabian
Sea from 2001 to 2002 during early Enduring Freedom operations.
Becker holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from
Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government
(2001), and diplomas from the Defense Language Institute (1991),
the Naval Command and Staff College (1993), and Armed Forces
Staff College (1996).
Becker was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: What is the overall mission of the Joint Staff Intelligence
Directorate (J2)?
A: It’s important to start with the mission of the Joint Staff before
talking about the mission of the Joint Staff J2. The chairman’s mission, and therefore the entire Joint Staff’s mission, is to provide the
16 | GIF 12.2

best military advice across the full spectrum of national security
concerns to the president and other national leaders. The specific J2
mission has three key components: first, to provide strategic warning of threats to our national interests; second, to rapidly deliver
all-source intel responses to military planning and contingency
operations; and third, to assess, validate, integrate and advocate
for current and future war fighting capability requirements of our
combatant commands.
Q: How is the J2 directorate organized, and what resources of
people and capabilities can you bring to bear to achieve your
missions?
A: There are about 200 personnel in the J2 Directorate, including military, civilian and a Reserve component. All of our personnel are administratively assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA), with the exception of a small number of teammates who are
embedded with us from other combat support agencies, such as
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Security
Agency, so we’re fully partnered. The J2 team is organized around
functional lines. We maintain a 24/7 operational support watch and
conduct analysis and warning, plans and policies, capabilities and
assessments, targeting, ISR and a small amount of admin mission
support. We’re a flat, responsive organization that’s more concerned
with unity of effort instead of personnel and administrative lines
of control.
www.GIF-kmi.com

Q: How has your extensive experience in intelligence and other
positions, including as director of intelligence (J2) for the International
Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Afghanistan, shaped
your approach to your current job?
A: Several lessons apply. First is that “teamwork, tone and tenacity”
are the characteristics that contribute to our positive command climate, which helps enable us to meet our mission. As far as serving
in crisis and combat, I’d say full integration of all sources and disciplines was the greatest contributor to intelligence success, and the
same applies here. Integration doesn’t come naturally; it takes time
and effort to get results from disparate parts; experience doing that
in the complex environment of Afghanistan paid dividends for doing
the same in the complex world of Washington, D.C., as well. Another
lesson learned in combat was that intelligence doesn’t just support
operations; intelligence is operations. And to successfully conduct
intelligence operations, we need to have a mindset that intel isn’t just
part of ‘war fighting,’ but that intel is a part of ‘war winning.’
I also have a final couple of thoughts from service in the
CENTCOM AOR that shape my current approach. First, counterinsurgency operations (COIN) taught me that war winning involves
fighting an adversary’s strategy, not just their forces—and to do that,
one need first comprehensively understand an adversary’s strategy.
Secondly, success in COIN did not rely solely on a military solution of
simply eliminating insurgents, and similarly, success in other highorder conventional military scenarios may not come from simply
attacking adversary weapon platforms. Success comes from using
information as a weapons system and using information to understand and influence all aspects of the battle space, from physical,
political, informational and economic levels as well.
Q: How would you define the concept of “joint intelligence,” and
how does it differ from other types of military intelligence?
A: I would use the term ‘interagency intelligence’ along with ‘joint
intelligence.’ Joint connotes different U.S. military services, and
coalition adds allies and partners. But operating with other branches
of the U.S. government, beyond DoD, is the heart of where we need
to be so that we’re most effective as an intel team. We do that here
at JCS J2, and are part of a strong network with all elements of the
U.S. intel community. Intel can be rather mechanic if it’s taken as
an isolated function, but by tapping into a joint and interagency network, we can add context, perspective, value and increase our effectiveness. The chairman and combatant commanders don’t just have
defense intelligence requirements, they have intelligence requirements. In order to give them what’s needed to achieve desired effects
in peace, crisis and combat, we must be more than joint, we must
be interagency.
Q: How would you describe the role of geospatial information in
military intelligence, now and in the future?
A: It’s critical. We’ve been lucky over the past decade by having air
supremacy in the skies above Afghanistan and Iraq, which allowed
us to augment national technical means GEOINT with air-breathing GEOINT from both manned aircraft and remotely piloted vehicles. But in the future, we will need greater quantities of GEOINT
concerning areas with denied airspace and from potential adversaries that are sophisticated at deception. Information is a weapon in
www.GIF-kmi.com

modern warfare, and GEOINT is a big part of what constitutes information. I like the NGA motto, which says, ‘Know the Earth, show
the way, understand the world.’ I can remember when the last part
of that phrase, about understanding the world, wasn’t part of the
motto. I’m glad it’s in there. NGA is the ‘gold standard’ in the IC for
collecting and moving data. But we also need to go the next step
and be able to add context to that data and turn it into information.
To effectively win against any potential adversary, we need to have a
deep understanding of that adversary’s strategy, and also the physical
environment in which they operate. That’s why GEOINT is critical.
Q: How would you define the rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific
region regarding specific short- and long-term threats to U.S.
national security?
A: Rebalancing towards Asia-Pacific as an imperative, not an option.
The term ‘whole of government’ is almost a cliché now, but we really
need every bit of it. The military is a leading aspect of U.S. government efforts to rebalance toward Asia/Pacific, but it’s not the only
aspect. We are also in the process of rebalancing economically, politically and from a strategic communications (information) perspective. Our economy and strategic security is increasingly connected
with the Asia-Pacific region. In the short term, the region is one
that has been consistently beset with natural disasters, which have
impacted our treaty allies’ and partner nations’ territory and people.
It’s in our national interest to keep these allies and partners stable
and secure by maintaining their territorial integrity, economic progress and quality of life. Also in the short term, there is one country,
North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and has publicly threatened to use them against us. That’s not something to be scoffed at.
In the longer term, we must understand a rising China. We are
competitors with China at an international level, but that does not
mean we need to be in conflict with them. One way we can avoid
drifting toward conflict is through a deep understanding of China’s
grand strategy, mindset, intent and the physical environment of their
nation and its periphery. If we don’t understand Chinese strategy in
the long run, we may think they are committing random acts in the
Asia/Pacific theater, and to counter them, we might undertake random responses ourselves. So I’ll sum up that point with a rhetorical
question: How many within the U.S. intel community truly understand China’s grand strategy, which they refer to as a ‘grand strategy
for rejuvenation by 2050’? Our effective shaping of the future for the
Asia/Pacific region depends on understanding just that.
Q: What relationships could be expanded that allow the entire
intelligence community and combatant commander Joint Intelligence
Operations Centers to be swiftly brought to bear?
A: There are physical and organizational aspects to relationship
expansion. I like how NGA shows the way by physically embedding personnel where it matters most—forward with warfighters
at different levels and theaters. I’m a believer that reaching forward is much more effective than reaching back. To be more specific, when NGA has an embedded analyst with an organization,
they bring three things: expertise, true leverage back to the parent
organization, and the ability to train others forward to be self-sufficient in the future. That’s an effective model for relationship expansion. Organizationally, there is great value to be added for the IC by
expanding relationships with academia and open source intelligence
GIF 12.2 | 17

networks. Not everything we need to know comes from highly classified/compartmented sources and methods. There is a great deal to
learn from social media as well as academic and historical study of
any environment.

information; and also to be more efficiently managed. There is a
global force management system in place, and we—the entire Joint
Staff—are evaluating the best ways to improve that as well.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Q: What recommendations do you have that would optimize the
global allocation of ISR resources for efficiency, effectiveness and
the anticipated budget environment in support of Joint Force 2020
development?
A: There is no easy solution here. Every boss I’ve had since 2001 has
told me, ‘Fix ISR!’ I’m still working on it, as are many others. I’ll start
with an approach as to what constitutes ISR. To many, it’s just satellites and air-breathing platforms. I believe it is much more. ISR has
a terrestrial component, which can be SIGINT or HUMINT. ISR has a
maritime component as well. These are all tools that should be comprehensively included into ISR considerations. But to respond more
directly to the question, the chairman has issued a capstone concept
for joint operations, called Joint Force 2020. The JCS J2 staff is preparing (with service and combatant command input) an adjunct ISR
white paper that will complement Joint Force 2020. It’s still in draft,
but the themes in it will include the need to be more diverse in the
type of systems that we use; to be more interoperable so that systems can share data on common networks and dissemination architectures; to ensure collection platforms are more survivable because
the enemy gets a vote on how these systems may receive/transmit

A: The JCS J2 team is always improving the quality of our professional network by listening and interacting more with those for
whom we advocate at the services and combatant commands. We’re
also trying to add more context rather than currency; not just sharing ‘what is happening?’, but putting more focus on the ‘so what?’
and ‘what’s next?’ The chairman’s guidance to all of the armed forces
is that in resource constrained times we will do less, but we cannot do less well. I take that to heart, every day, and spend the most
important part of my schedule considering how to make our JCS J2
team more effective/efficient, which includes improving the quantity/quality of relationships with other intelligence professionals and
their organizations. To aid in that effort, I reflect often on the guidance of a former commander, General McChrystal, who encouraged
us upon arrival in Afghanistan in 2009 ‘to challenge conventional
wisdom, and abandon practices that are engrained into military cultures, and I ask you to challenge me to do the same.’ I’ve shared that
guidance with the JCS J2 workforce as a compass to steer by, whether
one is conducting counterinsurgency operations in Southwest Asia,
wrestling with anti-access/area denial problems in the Pacific, or
simply trying to improve staff processes in the Pentagon. O

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High Performance Computing

Heterogeneous technology enables
computational capacity to keep up with the
rate at which geospatial and other data is
growing.

By Chris J. Michael, Elias Z. Ioup and John T. Sample
The growth of both human- and sensor-generated digital information over the past several years is astounding.
Geospatial data collection efforts can generate data on the
order of terabytes per day, and trends show that the amount
of data collected in the field will continue to grow. The data,
such as satellite or undersea imagery, LiDAR, hyperspectral
and sonar, is processed to generate higher-level data such as
digital maps, networks and tracks.
Within the last several years, the computing technologies we use for processing have not kept up with the rate at
which data is being created. When real-time processing is a
mission objective, the inability of processing to keep up with
data creation is especially troubling. In many cases the computing resources necessary to meet processing requirements
are greater than the size, weight and power constraints of an
operational mission.

www.GIF-kmi.com

GIF 12.2 | 19

The good news is that a performance deficit is not necessarily unavoidable; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just a matter of taking the time
to find the right set of tools for the job. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stateof-the-art computing technology offers several distinct
processor architectures, each of which specializes in distinct modes of computation. Using the right mix of processors, cost, energy, space and weight can be reduced
to a fraction of that required when using only one type
of architecture.
Designing computers using many different specialized
processor architectures rather than a single general-purpose architecture is referred to as heterogeneous computing, and is fast becoming the primary choice for building
high performance computing systems.

Paradigm Shift
For the past 30 years, the majority of computation has
been performed on the same ubiquitous general-purpose
processor architecture that is found in our desktop PCs.
These processors were relatively cheap and constantly
improving. Each new generation exhibited higher clock
rates, a phenomenon known as frequency scaling, and
increased transistor capacity. These processor improvements led to automatic speed-ups in existing applications.
General-purpose processors grew to dominate the
supercomputing world via the emergence of commodity
clusters, where many general-purpose systems were networked together in order to communicate and function as
one large computational device. Because the general-purpose processors employed by these systems were low in
price and readily available, computing centers were able
to get more bang for their buck compared to the more traditional custom-built supercomputers. Within the last 10
years, however, the physical properties and power dissipation limitations of these CPUs have driven manufacturers
to design chips differently.
Instead of one aggressive CPU core, manufacturers designed processors to have multiple, simpler cores.
Today, it is not uncommon to see general-purpose processors with four or more cores. In turn, applications are no
longer sped up automatically with every new generation
via frequency scaling. Rather, applications are sped up via
explicit parallelism. To take advantage of explicit parallelism, programmers have to manually change their application code, a process that is often quite difficult.
As the multicore paradigm was becoming prevalent for
general-purpose processors, other unique special-purpose

20 | GIF 12.2

designs emerged as well. While also requiring manual
adaptation of code, these specialized designs excelled in
different types of computation.
The most popular example of a special-purpose computing architecture is the graphics processing unit (GPU),
which grew from the need to improve performance when
generating 3-D graphics. GPUs were designed to quickly
perform many independent arithmetic computations in
parallel.
About a decade ago, the scientific computing community began programming GPUs to improve their computational scaling. Manufacturers soon supported this trend
both in hardware and software, creating the general-purpose GPU (GPGPU). Having nearly 100 times the arithmetic computation capacity of a general-purpose processor,
GPGPUs are available at competitive pricing and have
a comparable packaging and energy footprint. GPGPUs
excel at arithmetic, but lack the complex memory hierarchy of general-purpose processors.
GPGPUs have proven incredibly effective for a wide
variety of applications. Physics modeling, image processing, bioinformatics and digital signal processing are
among the many applications that can benefit with these
processors, often attaining speeds over 50 times faster
than their CPU counterparts.
When application execution does not fit well to
general-purpose CPUs or GPGPUs, a more customized
approach is necessary. Field Programmable Gate Array
(FPGA) processors contain programmable circuitry that
can be reconfigured in place within a matter of minutes.
As a result, the processor architecture can be changed on
the fly in order to suit different modes of computation.
FPGAs were widely used in the 1990s for integrated
circuit prototyping and development. Today, they are
emerging in high-performance computing due to their
ability to implement customized computing architectures,
even though their clock rate and computational density is
considerably lower than that of CPUs and GPGPUs. With
this great versatility comes high potential for efficiency.
However, the design process when utilizing FPGAs can be
more challenging, since the hardware design often must
be coded for each unique application.

Routing Analysis
Computer scientists in the Naval Research Laboratory
(NRL) Geospatial Computing group are conducting
research to effectively leverage these readily available

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processor architectures to support processing in the geospatial domain.
One of the more computationally intensive applications of interest is route analysis for vehicle navigation.
Here, analysts are interested in the connectivity of street
networks for mission planning purposes. Specialized algorithms will comb through huge amounts of data to build
an index for finding the quickest routes between all nodes
of the graph.
The data used for analysis could be the streets of entire
countries, and commonly contains more than five million intersections. Large-scale route analysis can take
well over a month to complete on a modern desktop PC.
Because the data is regularly updated and the results are
often used in other tasks, however, a more efficient and
timely process is required.
Routing analysis requires intensive data access, but is
light on arithmetic. Because of the immensity of the data
and the unusual way in which it is accessed, general-purpose processors do not perform analysis efficiently. These
processors are designed to operate on large contiguous
chunks of memory, whereas the routing analysis typically operates on small chunks of memory scattered over
a large space.
When using a general-purpose processor, NRL scientists were able to measure that up to 90 percent of the
memory accessed by the processor was wasted. The wasted
memory accesses not only make the analysis run inefficiently, but also waste a significant amount of energy
as well. Similarly, GPGPUs are not ideal candidates due
to their inability to work with large memory footprints.
Because of the memory wall exhibited by these processors, FPGAs were chosen as an alternative architecture
to explore a more efficient implementation of the route
analysis.
NRL evaluated numerous candidate architectures to
build an implementation that accessed memory with optimal efficiency. The Convey HC-2ex Hybrid Core computer was determined to be the best available option
for implementation. This architecture consists of a set of
general-purpose CPU hosts paired with a set of FPGA coprocessors. The FPGA co-processors are interfaced to separate high-speed physical memory than the host processors.
This high-speed memory has a large capacity and
may be accessed in small chunks, which is a good fit for
routing analysis. The Hybrid Threading tool provided by
Convey allowed for rapid prototyping of the FPGA design
using a software interface. A collaborative effort between

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Convey and NRL scientists yielded an effective processor
design within three weeks.
NRL carried out experiments to compare the Convey
FPGA-based system to a conventional server node of
equivalent form factor by using respective routing analysis implementations. The conventional implementation was executed on a high-end Dell server node with
64 cores, while the FPGA-based application was executed on a Convey HC-2ex with 4 FPGAs designed to have
64 cores.
Results showed that for inputs containing over a
million intersections, one Convey HC-2ex is five times
faster than the general-purpose systems in completing the routing analysis. Though the FGPA system costs
about 10 times that of a single server node, the savings in
space, weight and power are enough to justify the cost.
Moreover, the FPGA implementation still has of room for
optimization.
Heterogeneous computing with general-purpose
CPUs, GPGPUs, and FPGAs enables computational capacity to keep up with the rate at which field-collected data is
growing. However, as shown in our application example,
it is not always clear which of the heterogeneous architectures to use.
To solve this problem, the NRL Geospatial Computing
group is developing a computing model that determines
the most optimum heterogeneous system specification
given a certain application workload. As a result of this
research, deployed system designers will no longer need
to rely on intuition and rough benchmarking to specify tactical computational systems and estimate their
operational cost.
By applying the NRL computational model, designers
will be able to determine the best application implementation and resource mixes based on their mission requirements. The result will be improved processing timeliness
and data dissemination. O
Dr. Chris J. Michael, Dr. Elias Z. Ioup and Dr. John T.
Sample are with the Naval Research Laboratory, Stennis
Space Center, Miss.

For more information, contact GIF Editor
Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online
archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.

(Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note: Following are edited excerpts from remarks by Letitia A. Long, director of
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in a February 10, 2014, speech to Esri Federal GIS
User Conference.)
To optimize NGAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s service for
our customers, drive integration
and deliver what GEOINT promises, we have four critical strategic initiatives underway: open IT;
Map of the World; the Globe, our
user experience; and advanced analytic techniques. All four
of these support and reinforce each other, and we need to
make progress on all four.

22 | GIF 12.2

The open IT initiative lays the infrastructure for the other
three. NGA has adopted open IT standards and taken a lead
role in the Intelligence Community Information Technology
Enterprise [IC ITE] initiative. We are committed to that initiative and the equivalent in the Department of Defense, the
Joint Information Enterprise. The success of NGA depends on
the success of those initiatives.
Showing the way toward the integrated enterprise, we
moved to an open IT environment when we moved to our

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new campus in 2011. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been operating in the cloud since
then, and our improvements have resulted in increases in
productivity and user satisfaction, as well as the ability to
integrate not only all types of geospatial intelligence, but also
other INTs, as well as open source information.
The next initiative, and ultimately the bedrock for intelligence integration, is the Map of the World [MoW]. In the
past, you had to access multiple databases and search for
hours for information. You first had to know where to look.
But today, in a rapidly changing world, customers need
immediate access. They shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to know where to go
to get the information just to know that it is out there. So we
have created a MoW to be the home for all GEOINT-related

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and multi-source data, knowledge, analysis and reporting.
The MoW provides a seamless, integrated environment, so
that analysts can live within the data. They record their
observations and integrate all of their information about any
object of interest.
You may wonder how this MoW differs from other maps
of the world, or commercially available maps. Ours is all
about national security, so it includes geospatial content
that goes far beyond commercial offerings. It includes all
of our classified information, detailed maritime and aviation safety data that is critical for conducting military
operations. It includes our classified imagery. All of the intelligence is tailored for specific defense, IC and senior decision

GIF 12.2 | 23

maker requirements. We will have an instantiation on the Top
Secret and Secret networks, and also on our unclassified network,
but behind our firewall, so that those who need to have access will
be able to.
It will function for the foundation for intelligence integration,
because the common elements of all of our data are location and
time. Knowing where everything is located, and how it changes
over time, is the province of GEOINT.
Without quality service and easy access, however, the best
content may not be useful to the customer. The heart of NGA’s
customer experience is a single Web portal for access to all
GEOINT data and knowledge. Ultimately, all of our information
will be available at any time and from any location, through any
desktop or mobile device. We call this online initiative the Globe.
We realize that today we must provide an online experience
similar to that of any commercial website, but rather than having
an order system for a book or pizza, we have a far greater undertaking, which is to expose our data, analysis and knowledge so
senior leaders can solve their hard problems, the military can plan
safe and effective operations, and first responders can save lives.
Through the Globe, users will gain access to the MoW and all of
our GEOINT content. That content will be curated, or vetted for
quality and usefulness.
Our collaboration with partners during the response to
Typhoon Haiyan shows the progress that we are making in delivering the content. As the typhoon gathered strength, we created
an event page on our unclassified website, which enabled the
international disaster response community to access all of our
data, submit requests for that information, and share their data.
Most importantly, the event page enabled our partners to see and
use the damage assessments that were created as we created and
updated them.
One way we supported this was a groundbreaking step with
the International Red Cross; for the first time, working under
an agreement with the State Department and USAID, we were
able to give the Red Cross open access to our information. Their
field teams downloaded our data onto their tablets and smartphones, improving the accuracy of their ground truth, and were
able to update that as they worked. In addition, thanks to our
agreement with DigitalGlobe, we released for 30 days all of our
related commercial imagery to everyone who needed it, which
really made a difference to the Philippine government’s understanding of the situation on the ground. We also had unexpected
users who took advantage of it to produce their own disaster
relief products.
First, we exposed our relevant data to our federal partner,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which then made it
available to responders through their GeoPlatform map service, in
partnership with the Federal Geographic Data Committee. After
release, with pure self-service, a UN agency used our data for the
first time ever to create multi-layered areas maps to get out to the
UN community. PACOM, the U.S. military lead, made our data
available to their public network that they use to share with their
partners in the region.
This is exactly what we are talking about—getting our information out there, openly accessible, so that those who need it
can access it, add their information, provide it back to us, so
we can serve it back out. I’m sure that data is still being used in
ways we don’t even know. That shows how effective integration
24 | GIF 12.2

can be when you share your data, knowledge and analysis with
your partners. The event page, the easy access and the ease of collaboration all point toward a quality user experience that we are
developing through the Globe.
Those three initiatives establish the vital underpinning for
the ultimate purpose of our transformation, which is to deliver
advanced geospatial intelligence insights and serve as the foundation of intelligence integration.
We’ve gotten good at watching what we know and looking
where we think we might find something. We have indicators, and
are good at warning for the “known unknowns,” from the Cuban
Missile Crisis to North Korean missile developments. But today’s
crises, often sudden, rapidly evolving and influenced by social
media, mean that we can no longer do analysis that way. Instead,
we must focus on discovering the “unknown unknowns” that are
hidden in the masses of data that are created every day, and discover them more quickly than before.
One way of getting at these unknowns is through an advanced
analytic tradecraft that we are pioneering, called activity based
intelligence. Using big data analytics, automated processing, our
ABI tradecraft, we are discovering critical surprises hidden in
masses of data, as well as secrets that our adversaries are trying
to hide.
Automated processing frees the analyst to think more deeply,
answer intelligence questions more quickly, and generate new
perspectives for customers. The result is more decision space and
deeper insight, so our policymakers and warfighters can determine better courses of action.
Success of our transformation depends on the success of all
four of these initiatives, which are all interdependent. They are
so critical that we have realigned hundreds of millions of dollars
across our budget for the next five years to support them. We’re
killing off programs that aren’t taking the direction we want to
go, and moving that money into investments that will drive us
to achieve our planned future state in 2018—a fully integrated
GEOINT enterprise.
We’ve laid out our strategy and are making tremendous progress, but there are challenges. For industry, we need help in developing these critical capabilities—technology solutions that will
give access to the MoW in remote environments; automated production of standard maps and charts for the MoW; and technology
that automatically collects video from trusted users and partners.
But you have to determine the trusted users and partners, so we
need identity management in order to match users and their credentials, and give them access for what is appropriate for them to
have. We also need a fast editing capability, so that we can rapidly
update our digital map data in a crisis.
For the government, I urge adoption of the Open Geospatial
Consortium standards for your data. Meta-tag your data, and
expose it and make it accessible. If it’s not out there for others to
use, you’re not realizing the full value of that data. Expose your
apps and analysis. Let us expand collaboration and integration
beyond the IC and DoD, to other federal, state and local governments as appropriate. O

For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly
at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives
for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.

An estimated six industry teams are competing for a contract to provide the Air Force and key members of the intelligence community with nearly $1 billion in advanced GEOINT
and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) technology and services.
The contract, known as the Advanced Technical Exploitation
Program II (ATEP II), is expected to be awarded this summer
by the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center
(NASIC), which is based at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.
Industry observers anticipate that up to four of the teams,
each of which is led by a small business prime contractor, will
be selected.
Selection for the ATEP II contract will enable teams to compete for $120 million in task orders each year for eight years,
www.GIF-kmi.com

for GEOINT services that include synthetic aperture radar,
overhead persistent infrared (OPIR), light detection and ranging, ground moving target indicator, thermal infrared, multispectral/hyperspectral, and full motion video, as well as
such MASINT technologies as electro-optical, over-the-horizon radar, line-of-sight radar, and radio frequency data sources.
The contract competition has attracted considerable attention both because of the size of the contract and because of
the critical role played by NASIC, which serves not only the Air
Force and other military branches, but also provides vital services to major intelligence agencies.
In addition, the contract process has also been noteworthy in reflecting a broader ongoing debate about the
potential role of small business in developing and sustaining
GIF 12.2 | 25

vice president, C4ISR networked systems, Northrop Grumman
advanced technology. Although the current ATEP contract has
Electronic Systems.
been held by industry teams led by major corporations—Ball
Northrop Grumman specializes in satellite and radar processAerospace, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems and
ing, with more than 40 years of experience in processing OPIR
Northrop Grumman Information Systems—the new contract
data, which is a key aspect of NASIC’s mission. The company
requires that the prime contractor on each team be a company
brings experience specifically in GEOINT and MASINT, which
with fewer than 1,500 employees.
includes planning and direction, collection, processing and exploiThe Air Force’s small business approach has drawn questions
tation, analysis and production, and dissemination activities.
from contrasting perspectives. Some in Congress and industry
“Having Northrop Grumman on the ATEP II Team will help
have asked whether the program’s scope, scale, complexity and
us provide an unparalleled level of support to the NASIC mission,”
mission criticality made it a good choice for small business parsaid David W. Ross, assistant vice president of Dayton, Ohio, operaticipation at the prime sponsor level. On the other hand, small
tions for Radiance Technologies.
business representatives have argued that the program should be
Another major competitor is Team Integrity, a 19-member
limited to even smaller-sized companies, and sought unsuccessalliance led by Integrity Applications Inc. (IAI), a 600-employee
fully through a federal appeals process to bring that about.
engineering and software company with a focus
Analysts say the Air Force policy represents a
on Government space and intelligence surveillance
middle course aimed at fostering entrepreneurial
reconnaissance systems activities. The team also
innovation while reducing the risk that the governincludes MacAulay-Brown and Woolpert, both of
ment would be left reliant for vital services on firms
which are based near NASIC’s Dayton, Ohio, headthat might have shaky finances or limited expertise.
quarters, as well as Leidos and General Dynamics
The current and future ATEP contracts call for a
Advanced Information Systems.
broad and complex range of services involving some
Team Integrity can deliver the types of services
of the most advanced intelligence technology. For
that NASIC is looking for, ranging from high end
ATEP II, within each of 12 GEOINT and MASINT
research and development support to operations,
technical mission areas, contractors must be able to
sustainment and production, according to Robert D.
provide three different kinds of support.
Robert D. Thomas
Thomas, vice president, analytical services for IAI.
The first is operations support, in which the con“From our perspective, IAI is a company that is strong in most
tractor provides analysts who work onsite at NASIC, doing day-toof the sensors and phenomenologies,” Thomas said. “But our parday analysis of data that is collected in each of the mission areas.
ticularly strong suit is on the R&D side, where we have a lot of talThe analysts produce time-critical intelligence products by perented people with advanced degrees. That’s the piece of the puzzle
forming highly technical analysis of data collected by sensors
that we fill, and then we have others on our team that are good at
hosted on ground, air and space-based platforms.
production, sustainment and other aspects.”
The second type of support is development and sustainment of
“Our roots and relationships in the specific phenomenologies
end-to-end systems and software tools that allow analysts to anaare key to the NASIC customer. We have folks that work within
lyze the data.
the IC and DoD organizations that NASIC leans on, partners with
The third activity, which is in many ways the most important
and supports.
to NASIC, is the basic research that underlies the development of
We have lots of folks that are part of IAI that came out of that
the systems and software tools. This requires expertise in sensor
community, whether active duty or civil service scientific support.
design, remote sensing phenomenology and advanced signal proWe’re familiar with NASIC, and also its position in supporting not
cessing techniques.
only the Air Force and other services, but also the other IC organizations,” Thomas said.
Team Line-ups
After competing to be selected for a prime award for the indefinite
delivery/indefinite quantity contract, winning teams will then
By lowering the size limit for ATEP-II, the Air Force spurred
have to respond effectively to win individual task orders under the
a reshuffling of the teams performing on the current contract, as
Air Force’s two-phase award process.
each of the three prime contractors sought a smaller partner to
In selecting teams for the prime contract, Air Force officials
lead its team in the competition. Although the teams generally are
have indicated that they will use lowest-price technically accepttreating their membership line-ups as proprietary, it is possible to
able criteria, under which the government first identifies all conidentify some of the key players.
tenders able to perform the work within acceptable standards
Ball Aerospace, for example, went through a lengthy selection
of performance, and then selects the lowest-price bidders from
process before joining with Invertix Corp. as prime contractor. A
those. Air Force officials have vowed to do a rigorous job in measpecialist in cloud-based big data analysis, Invertix subsequently
suring technical acceptability. After the ATEP II contracts are
merged with Near Infinity, another small company, to form
awarded, each of the winning primes will be competing for task
Altamira Technologies Corporation.
orders, which the government plans to award using a best value
Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, joined a team led by Radiance
approach. O
Technologies, a provider of GEOINT, MASINT and other services to
the IC and Department of Defense.
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly
“This teaming arrangement greatly advances the objective
at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives
of ATEP II and the mission of NASIC by offering them cuttingfor related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
edge technology, innovation and experience,” said Edward Bush,
26 | GIF 12.2

Richard Cooke
Vice President
Geospatial Intelligence Solutions
Exelis
Q: Tell us about yourself and how you joined
Exelis VIS.
A: I joined Exelis in 2000 and currently
hold the position of vice president for the
Geospatial Intelligence Solutions business
at Exelis Geospatial Systems. Previously, I
served as the president of the company’s subsidiary, Exelis Visual Information Solutions
(Exelis VIS). Before being appointed as president of Exelis VIS in January 2002, I was the
vice president of engineering and information
technology with the company. My breadth of
roles with Exelis gives me a unique perspective on the geospatial market, having grown
with the company as the industry has evolved
as a whole. Ultimately, my role at Exelis
remains the same. I am responsible for creating the vision for, and bringing to market,
software technologies that facilitate advances
in geospatial data acquisition, analysis and
dissemination to the people who need it to
make more informed decisions.
Q: ENVI products are the flagship of Exelis
VIS. What are some of the more recent
developments?
A: ENVI was groundbreaking in helping forward deployed military and intelligence specialists plan and execute successful missions.
Now, we are leveraging the larger Exelis organization to create and deliver software solutions that utilize geospatial data to solve
problems across the defense and intelligence
chain. In other words, our ENVI products
are still core; they are the advanced analytic
capabilities that are part of a larger, more
integrated web-based system that delivers
technology for ingesting, managing, discovering and disseminating remotely sensed and
other geographically contextual data. This
system, Jagwire, has been field-tested and is
currently being used in several military and
intelligence programs. ENVI tools are still
available as a complete desktop package, but
we are now making those capabilities available in a more flexible way.
Q: How important is partnering with other
companies, most recently Skybox Imaging
28 | GIF 12.2

and larger initiatives such as Esri, key to
your company’s success?
A: Exelis believes partnering with others
in the industry who deliver complementary
products and technology is ultimately beneficial to our customers. Our customers are
looking for solutions, and they want those
of us in the industry to solve them by working together to integrate what we respectively
do best. For example, Exelis developed a close
partnership with Esri years ago, and that has
resulted in our products being seamlessly
integrated. Our coincident customers recognize countless benefits—programs that save
time, money and resources by investing a
single system, rather than multiple software
solutions. The end-user also has a much more
streamlined workflow and can produce better
results, faster. In the case of data providers,
Exelis recently established a new relationship
with Skybox, in addition to our longstanding
partnerships with other leading providers in
the industry.
Q: What unique benefits does your company
provide its customers in comparison to
similar geospatial companies?
A: The Jagwire solution from Exelis makes
the discovery, management and dissemination of geospatial data and video easier than
ever. Jagwire is a force multiplier and an intelligence aggregator. With a Web-enabled, single, unified interface for accessing multiple
modalities, INT types and other geospatial
intelligence, Jagwire provides a single solution
for the processing, ingestion, management,
discovery and dissemination of still imagery,
full motion video and other geospatial intelligence products from manned and unmanned
ISR and ground-based sensors, regardless of
where the data resides. Exelis has adapted to

changing technologies and the DoD missions
it supports by developing the next generation
Jagwire solution to provide analysts, special
operators and decision makers in DoD and
the intelligence community access to multiple imaging modalities from a Web-enabled
user interface. The software solution eliminates the need for administering and accessing multiple, disparate systems. Jagwire’s fully
integrated capabilities significantly improve
situational awareness, further reducing the
time and complexity of getting critical and
time-sensitive data out to the tactical edge
and back.
Q: How do you see the role of GEOINT
changing for the defense and intelligence
communities?
A: The need for interoperability and openstandards is key to creating a truly collaborative GEOINT environment. Ultimately, critical
GEOINT information needs to be available to
users on demand, anywhere in the world. At
Exelis, we are architecting our products to
seamlessly fit into cloud-based infrastructures. This in turn enables our users to collaborate in support of critical operations. Also,
technologies from the commercial world that
enable advanced and anticipatory analytics
from both traditional and unstructured data
types, such as social media, will be critical to
the delivery of richer insights from GEOINT
data, reduce analysts’ workloads, automate
critical intelligence gathering processes and
reduce time from collection to actionable
information.
Q: What will Exelis be showcasing and
talking about at the upcoming GEOINT
Symposium?
A: Exelis looks forward to showcasing the company’s ISR and analytics solutions in Booth
3035 at this year’s GEOINT 2013* Symposium
& Exhibition, April 14-17, 2014, in Tampa, Fla.
In addition to our ENVI and Jagwire solutions, Exelis will feature our wide area motion
imagery surveillance solution, which observes
activity, tracks movement and gathers critical
intelligence over a wide area. O
www.GIF-kmi.com

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